Two Feathers in China

Who knew what I'd find at the Chongqing North train station--huffing through the double doors just as the last call was being made to board the train to Chengdu. I needed to make another journey through the beautiful terraced mountains of Sichuan to do routine Peace Corps business in Chengdu, "close of service" tasks that every volunteer must do. And there, as I was debating whether to board the train alone or not, came Two Feathers in her huge bright turquoise T-shirt and baggy below the knee denim shorts. Her white roots proudly peeked through her brown hair, pulled back in a long, long braid. Nothing about Two Feathers is normal in China, where even the petite street sweepers and construction workers wear their hair in tidy buns with glittering hair clips. Nothing about Two Feathers is the least bit normal here, and yet she is beloved.

Why was a bit of a puzzle to me, at least at first, because I've certainly witnessed foreigners whose ways were so odd, so removed from Chinese reality, that they just didn't succeed in establishing much rapport. Not the case with Two Feathers, whose students at Chongqing Medical University look after her and take her everywhere--and yet learn from her, find her an amazing eye opener.

Two Feathers is a volunteer, a year behind me, also serving in the municipality (think province) of Chongqing. When she heard I was going to Chengdu, she decided to go with me so that together we could pay a visit to the host family who took each of us in when we first arrived in China. In the summer of 2012 during "pre-service training" I lived with Li Ying and her husband Peng Laoshi. Then, in the summer of 2013 while I was traipsing around China, Two Feathers lived with them, her first summer in China. My Chinese is not the best (a masterpiece of understatement), but Two Feathers was dependent on me--so I did all the negotiations in train stations, buses, taxis, foreign student dormitory, and so on--I was the one to carry the conversation with Li Ying and Peng Laoshi.

It was absolutely wonderful to see them and to taste again some of Li Ying's fabulous cooking, including an incredible catfish dish. I'd never seen Li Ying so radiant, so happy--possibly because her pregnant daughter was visiting. We saw pictures of their recent travels and heard about plans to visit relatives in San Diego.

Now Two Feathers hasn't always used her Native American name--in fact, she had to stage a silent protest at Rutgers to be allowed to have it called out at graduation. Her protest involved wearing a mask in keeping with her Apache traditions, but a mask that also had some red, white, and blue because she was a Vietnam veteran who had served in the military until retirement. That service was her ticket to an education, which she got only later in life--none of her eleven older siblings had degrees.

If she grew up poor and an object of discrimination in all the complex ways that race, class, gender, and ethnicity are bound together, she hasn't let any of that deflate her spirit. In a husky contralto, she talks non-stop and just charges ahead. She has 180 students--not altogether but in just one of her speaking classes--which for Two Feathers is no problem. She adapts a group plan until it works, gets them all talking, keeps them all accountable, and spares them nothing. She gets them on fire. None of her stories are censored and she elicits from them all kinds of stories and testimonies that I find utterly amazing. She keeps her ear close to their needs, finding all things medical for her medical students and tapping video clips of contemporary pop stars for her undergraduates. She meets them where they are and seems to find them.

There's nothing standard about this person--not her English, not her appearance, not her manners, not her approach to anything. And yet driving all of it seems to be a will to make the best of it, and that is deeply Chinese. She just goes, ever resourceful in her attempts to connect, to help, to teach. By all accounts, she reaches them, with students crowding into her classroom, into her apartment, onto QQ, and offering to take her anywhere, protecting her, helping her.

Utterly amazing Two Feathers (left).